The Grapes of Wrath, 82 years later
By Rosanna Harvey-Crawford
Earlier this year, I read The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel published in 1939 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The novel is about a family called the Joads who have lost their small tenant farm, located in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, and are heading west to California to pick fruit in the sun. Charting this journey across the country the book chronicles the harsh reality many migrants were greeted with on reaching California.
This moving piece of fiction was born out of Steinbeck’s own work to raise awareness of migrant families in the 1930s. Writing for the San Francisco News, Steinbeck produced a series of pamphlets on families who had travelled to California for work, but were now living in migrant camps or along the side of roads. He spent time in the camps and provided Americans with first-hand accounts of the hardship and marginalisation many migrants were facing. When The Grapes of Wrath was published, it was hugely popular with working class readers, but denounced as ‘communist propaganda’ by business and government officials due to its socialist themes.
Dorothea Lange also became famous for documenting migrant lives in the 1930s. Picture source.
The Joad family are on the road because the faceless monster of the ‘bank’ has taken away their tenant farm. In the ‘30s, thousands of farmers in the ‘Dust Bowl’ had their tenancies removed, with the land turned over to large scale industrial farming. The Dust Bowl got its name from the dust storms that occurred over the course of the 30s – lack of knowledge of the soil topology in the region meant years of farming had eroded it, and removed grasses that retained moisture. Instead of allowing the ground to repair, after tenant farmers were removed tractors began ploughing the land. This coincided with years of drought and subsequent strong winds carried away the weakened topsoil, causing storms that covered everything for miles in a layer of fine dust. These storms have become synonymous with the Great Depression of the ‘30s.
Writing pre-Green Revolution, before tractors ploughing large tracts of land would become the norm, Steinbeck laments the detachment from nature that these new farming methods have brought – ‘man ate what they had not raised and had no connection with the bread’. Paradoxically, once the Joads arrive in California they are surrounded by lush farms growing fruit, grain and cotton but are excluded from them with no money for their own food. While staying in migrant camps or living on roadsides, the families in The Grapes of Wrath struggle to find work while being harassed or ostracised by the police and California citizens.
Often, the 1930s are romanticised or simply overlooked thanks to a British cultural obsession with the World Wars. I didn’t know how hard they were for certain people, and I was surprised to see themes that I would more commonly associate with the current climate crisis or refugee crisis woven into the novel’s narrative. Steinbeck’s distrust of capitalist institutions, rejection of industrial farming and sympathy for the marginalised and dispossessed seem inherently ‘modern’ values that would probably earn him the label of ‘mung bean munching, hair shirt wearing eco-freak’ today. Hippy ridiculing aside, Grapes of Wrath reminds me that the problems we see and experience today have come before. While it is alarming to see us making the same mistakes, it is reassuring to know there are powerful books like this one to (hopefully) set us back on the right track.
